[4hEn]

> if you're allowing the general public to submit reviews.

Why? Do you believe it would accumulate spam and negativity because it's inexpensive for anyone to submit a review? What if there was a cost attached to posting a review?

[JohnFen]

For a ton of reasons. Fake or purchased reviews is a big part, but also the fact that honest reviews are often misleading or incorrect. As one example, I've often read reviews where the people submitted them before or immediately after they've received the product, and so can't possibly have enough information to write a useful review. Or reviews that are often skewed by price point, encouraging people to rave about crappy products simply because they were cheap.

Amazon reviews are a great example of all of these problems, I think.

If the reviews are about an employer, then there's a whole other level of problems with them. Perhaps the reviewer didn't get along with their manager and so have an honestly terrible opinion of the place, but really, the place is generally great. Or perhaps the opposite -- the reviewer got along wonderfully with their manager and so they're ignoring all sorts of real issues with that employer.

> What if there was a cost attached to posting a review?

I don't think that would help. It might even make things worse, because it would filter out more ordinary people and tilt the balance more towards paid reviewers.

I mean, I could be wrong here. But I've not yet seen a place that allows the general public to submit reviews where the reviews were helpful or accurate in terms of figuring out if the product or service is worth purchasing.

[deniszpua]

If you think of reviews not as score but subjective opinions and do not try to fool yourself by trying to come up with some magic function that extracts all the valuable data from them and nullify subjective judgement, they are valuable. The hard task is to read them and extract valuable information, so that sometimes the effort does not worth the result, but this one is also a bonus, since non-structured data is hard to game.

[JohnFen]

> If you think of reviews not as score but subjective opinions

I do think of them that way. But I have no context in which to interpret those opinions, so they are valueless to me. If I don't know what the reviewer values and doesn't value, I can't know how to interpret the review.

It's like with movie reviews -- a movie review from someone I don't know is without value, because I don't know what their tastes are. Did they dislike the movie because it's bad, or because they don't like that particular style? There's no way of knowing.

This all would be more workable if all reviews were honest, but they aren't. When you toss in the need to try to discern what reviews are real and what reviews aren't, the entire task becomes impossible.

This is why I've learned to ignore all reviews that aren't from someone that I am already familiar with.